


Sentinels

by fresne



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Giant Trees, Sequoia, redwoods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-08
Updated: 2014-07-08
Packaged: 2018-02-08 00:20:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1919637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/pseuds/fresne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They aren't silent. The sentinels who stand in the forest. They creak. They groan. Their branches make a sort of chorus in the wind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sentinels

**Author's Note:**

> Something I wrote after visiting the Calaveras Big Trees park.

They aren't silent. The Sentinels who stand in the forest. They creak. They groan. Their branches make a sort of chorus in the wind. 

When a man stripped the Mother of the Forest of her bark, they did not call out. How could they. They had no mouths, nor ever will have. When fire took the dead body of their naked Mother, the forest roared, and crackled and seeds fell like rain. 

They do not periodically rip up roots to rumble and walk about. They aren't Ents walking on Middle Earth. They are not dryads come to eat rich loamy earth with Bacchus in Narnia. There are not trees that walk. Light, flighty woods.

When the Dark Lord rose, they did not rip themselves up to join the fight. Although, a hobbit did collect their seeds and scatter them in the ashy soil under a fallen tower. 

But this is not the story of a grove planted like a stand of soldiers in lines below mountains far from their native home. 

This is the story of Sentinels cast randomly in the woods by fate.

Sequoiadendron Giganteum. They stay where they fall after the forest blooms in fire and tinder burning brush is cleared away.

A colony of ants scurries away from their former home with the eggs clutched in their forelimbs around a great root of a Sentinel. This tree is hollowed out some twenty feet up from a fire that blazed across these woods when William first conquered English oaks. The tree creaks a further two hundred feet more. Gleaming shadows in the setting sun. The tree does not regard the ants. The tree does not have eyes, nor ever will have. Capillaries and bark and roots, and why would it bother with eyes? A scurry. A new colony in the pine down soil. 

When the dead rose to attack the living, the hollowed out hulk of a tree lying sprawled on the ground, did not lurch its roots back into the soil. It decayed. Slowly. Crumbling shard by shard into earth while all other sentinels of its kind stood at a distance. 

A thousand generation of squirrels evolved into complex life forms capable of singing pop melodies in a Sentinel's branches. They lived and died and gnawed at the cones to get them ready for the next fire.

When the aliens invaded, and the humans scurried through the woods to escape, a great hulking ship strafed the woods. Fire licked at the firs and the fire consumed the brush and the sentinels laughed in a rustle of branches high above the fire with their thick smouldering bark, let loose cones on the cooling ash. 

It's not that the return of the Fey couldn't have affected the Sentinels, it's just that it never occurred to the great grey lords from under the mound to make trees walk. 

Which was for the best, the Sentinels have a long range plan involving building a bridge to the stars, which they are only ten thousand years or so from completing.

**Author's Note:**

> The middle earth grove is inspired by a very regimented Redwood (coastal) grove in New Zealand.
> 
> If after reading my fiction here, you would like to read more about me and my writing check out my profile.


End file.
